Jake Wallis Simons reviews Archaeology: a Secret History, the first in a new
three-part series examining key moments.

In Archaeology: a Secret History (BBC Four), the laddish presenter, Dr Richard Miles – who can only be described as the evil twin of Peep Show’s Robert Webb – was so busy making like Indiana Jones, and posing on a yacht like a pharaoh, and going on about how he was on a “quest” and a “voyage of discovery”, that it was almost impossible to absorb what he was saying. And the globetrotting was gratuitous.

The artefacts were good, though, including the nail that is said to have fixed Jesus to the Cross and a Neanderthal skull. And the concept of a history of archaeology was interesting (though quite why the BBC insists on referring to every history as “secret” is anyone’s guess).

At one point, Dr Miles replicated the efforts made by John Aubrey (1626 – 1697), who pioneered the archaeological field survey by mapping the precise location of megalithic monuments using lengths of string and primitive instruments. It began to get rather engaging; he then went off on a tangent about Archbishop Ussher, the early 17th-century churchman who used mathematics to establish that the precise date of creation was Sunday 23 October, 4004BC. Interesting fact. But Dr Miles dampened it by rolling it up into a bit of a lecture.

That was the nub of the problem: the brief was just too broad. We were introduced to a host of little-known yet fascinating figures, such as Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli, an insistently peripatetic humanist antiquarian from 15th-century Ancona who travelled the world drawing ancient sites; and John Leland, a 16th-century English poet and historian. But these and other characters flitted in and out of the narrative with such alacrity that we should have been given a whistle with which to request a stop. In the end, I just fell asleep.